A molecular phylogeny of the pheasants and partridges suggests that these lineages are not monophyletic

Cytochrome b and D-loop nucleotide sequences were used to study patterns of molecular evolution and phylogenetic relationships between the pheasants a nd the partridges, which are thought 60 form two closely related monophylet ic galliform lineages. Our analyses used 34 complete cytochrome b and 22 pa rtial D-loop sequences from the hypervariable domain I of the D-loop, repre senting 20 pheasant species (15 genera) and 12 partridge species (5 genera) . We performed parsimony, maximum likelihood, and distance analyses to reso lve these phylogenetic relationships. In this dataset, transversion analyse s gave results similar to those of global analyses. All of our molecular ph ylogenetic analyses indicated that the pheasants and partridges arose throu gh a rapid radiation, making it difficult to establish higher level relatio nships. However, we were able to establish six major lineages containing ph easant and partridge taxa, including one lineage containing both pheasants and partridges (Gallus, Bambusicola and Francolinus). This result, supporte d by maximum likelihood tests, indicated that the pheasants and partridges; do not form independent monophyletic lineages. (C) 1999 Academic Press.